1

SORCERERS OF ANTIQUITY AN INTRODUCTION

Don Juan stressed, time and time again, that everything he was teaching me had been envisioned
and worked out by men he referred to as sorcerers of antiquity. He made it very clear that there
was a profound distinction between those sorcerers and the sorcerers of modern times. He
categorized sorcerers of antiquity as men who existed in Mexico perhaps thousands of years
before the Spanish Conquest, men whose greatest accomplishment had been to build the
structures of sorcery, emphasizing practicality and concreteness. He rendered them as men who
were brilliant but lacking in wisdom. Modern sorcerers, by contrast, don Juan portrayed as men
renowned for their sound minds and their capacity to rectify the course of sorcery if they
deemed it necessary.
Don Juan explained to me that the sorcery premises pertinent to dreaming were naturally
envisioned and developed by sorcerers of antiquity. Out of necessity-for those premises are
key in explaining and understanding dreaming-I again have to write about and discuss them.
The major part of this book is, therefore, a reintroduction and amplification of what I have
presented in my previous works.
During one of our conversations, don Juan stated that, in order to appreciate the position of
dreamers and dreaming, one has to understand the struggle of modern-day sorcerers to steer
sorcery away from concreteness toward the abstract.
"What do you call concreteness, don Juan?" I asked.
"The practical part of sorcery," he said. "The obsessive fixation of the mind on practices and
techniques, the unwarranted influence over people. All of these were in the realm of the
sorcerers of the past."
"And what do you call the abstract?"
"The search for freedom, freedom to perceive, without obsessions, all that's humanly
possible. I say that present-day sorcerers seek the abstract because they seek freedom; they
have no interest in concrete gains. There are no social functions for them, as there were for
the sorcerers of the past. So you'll never catch them being the official seers or the sorcerers in
residence."
"Do you mean, don Juan, that the past has no value to modern-day sorcerers?"
"It certainly has value. It's the taste of that past which we don't like. I personally detest the
darkness and morbidity of the mind. I like the immensity of thought. However, regardless of
my likes and dislikes, I have to give due credit to the sorcerers of antiquity, for they were the
first to find out and do everything we know and do today.
Don Juan explained that their most important attainment
was to perceive the energetic essence of things. This insight was of such importance that it
was turned into the basic premise of sorcery. Nowadays, after lifelong discipline and training,
sorcerers do acquire the capacity to perceive the essence of things, a capacity they call
seeing.
"What would it mean to me to perceive the energetic essence of things?" I once asked don
Juan.
"It would mean that you perceive energy directly," he replied. "By separating the social part
of perception, you'll perceive the essence of everything. Whatever we are perceiving is
energy, but since we can't directly perceive energy, we process our perception to fit a mold.
This mold is the social part of perception, which you have to separate.
"Why do I have to separate it?"
"Because it deliberately reduces the scope of what can be perceived and makes us believe
that the mold into which we fit our perception is all that exists. I am convinced that for man
to survive now, his perception must change at its social base."
"What is this social base of perception, don Juan?"
"The physical certainty that the world is made of concrete objects. I call this a social base
because a serious and fierce effort is put out by everybody to guide us to perceive the world
the way we do."
"How then should we perceive the world?"
"Everything is energy. The whole universe is energy. The social base of our perception
should be the physical certainty that energy is all there is. A mighty effort should be made to
guide us to perceive energy as energy. Then we would have both alternatives at our
fingertips."
"Is it possible to train people in such a fashion?" I asked.
Don Juan replied that it was possible and that this was precisely what he was doing with
me and his other apprentices. He was teaching us a new way of perceiving, first, by
making us realize we process our perception to fit a mold and, second, by fiercely
guiding us to perceive energy directly. He assured me that this method was very much like
the one used to teach us to perceive the world of daily affairs.
Don Juan's conception was that our entrapment in processing our perception to fit a social
mold loses its power when we realize we have accepted this mold, as an inheritance from our
ancestors, without bothering to examine it.
"To perceive a world of hard objects that had either a positive or a negative value must have
been utterly necessary for our ancestors' survival," don Juan said. "After ages of perceiving in
such a manner, we are now forced to believe that the world is made up of objects."
"I can't conceive the world in any other way, don Juan," I complained. "It is unquestionably a
world of objects. To prove it, all we have to do is bump into them."
"Of course it's a world of objects. We are not arguing that."
"What are you saying then?"
"I am saying that this is first a world of energy; then it's a world of objects. If we don't start
with the premise that it is a world of energy, we'll never be able to perceive energy directly.
We'll always be stopped by the physical certainty of what you've just pointed out: the
hardness of objects."
His argument was extremely mystifying to me. In those days, my mind would simply refuse
to consider any way to understand the world except the one with which I was familiar. Don
Juan's claims and the points he struggled to raise were outlandish propositions that I could
not accept but could not refuse either.
"Our way of perceiving is a predator's way," he said to me on one occasion. "A very efficient
manner of appraising and classifying food and danger. But this is not the only way we are
able to perceive. There is another mode, the one I am familiarizing you with: the act of
perceiving the essence of everything, energy itself, directly.
"To perceive the essence of everything will make us understand, classify, and describe the
world in entirely new, more
exciting, more sophisticated terms." This was don Juan's claim. And the more sophisticated
terms to which he was alluding were those he had been taught by his predecessors, terms that
correspond to sorcery truths, which have no rational foundation and no relation whatsoever to
the facts of our daily world but which are self-evident truths for the sorcerers who perceive
energy directly and see the essence of everything.
For such sorcerers, the most significant act of sorcery is to see the essence of the universe.
Don Juan's version was that the sorcerers of antiquity, the first ones to see the essence of the
universe, described it in the best manner. They said that the essence of the universe resembles
incandescent threads stretched into infinity in every conceivable direction, luminous
filaments that are conscious of themselves in ways impossible for the human mind to
comprehend.
From seeing the essence of the universe, the sorcerers of antiquity went on to see the energy
essence of human beings. Don Juan stated that they depicted human beings as bright shapes
that resembled giant eggs and called them luminous eggs.
"When sorcerers see a human being," don Juan said, "they see a giant, luminous shape that
floats, making, as it moves, a deep furrow in the energy of the earth, just as if the luminous
shape had a taproot that was dragging."
Don Juan had the impression that our energy shape keeps on changing through time. He said
that every seer he knew, himself included, saw that human beings are shaped more like balls
or even tombstones than eggs. But, once in a while, and for no reason known to them,
sorcerers see a person whose energy is shaped like an egg. Don Juan suggested that people
who are egglike in shape today are more akin to people of ancient times.
In the course of his teachings, don Juan repeatedly discussed and explained what he
considered the decisive finding of the sorcerers of antiquity. He called it the crucial feature of
human beings as luminous balls: a round spot of intense brilliance, the size of a tennis ball,
permanently lodged inside the luminous ball, flush with its surface, about two feet back from
the crest of a person's right shoulder blade.
Since I had trouble visualizing this the first time don Juan described it to me, he explained
that the luminous ball is much larger than the human body, that the spot of intense brilliance
is part of this ball of energy, and that it is located on a place at the height of the shoulder
blades, an arm's length from a person's back. He said that the old sorcerers named it the
assemblage point after seeing what it does.
"What does the assemblage point do?" I asked.
"It makes us perceive," he replied. "The old sorcerers saw that, in human beings, perception
is assembled there, on that point. Seeing that all living beings have such a point of brilliance,
the old sorcerers surmised that perception in general must take place on that spot, in whatever
pertinent manner."
"What did the old sorcerers see that made them conclude that perception takes place on the
assemblage point?" I asked.
He answered that, first, they saw that out of the millions of the universe's luminous energy
filaments passing through the entire luminous ball, only a small number pass directly through
the assemblage point, as should be expected since it is small in comparison with the whole.
Next, they saw that a spherical extra glow, slightly bigger than the assemblage point, always
surrounds it, greatly intensifying the luminosity of the filaments passing directly through that
glow.
Finally, they saw two things. One, that the assemblage points of human beings can dislodge
themselves from the spot where they are usually located. And, two, that when the assemblage
point is on its habitual position, perception and awareness seem to be normal, judging by the
normal behavior of the subjects being observed. But when their assemblage points and
surrounding glowing spheres are on a different position than the habitual one, their unusual
behavior seems to be the proof
that their awareness is different, that they are perceiving in an unfamiliar manner.
The conclusion the old sorcerers drew from all this was that the greater the displacement of
the assemblage point from its customary position, the more unusual the consequent behavior
and, evidently, the consequent awareness and perception.
"Notice that when I talk about seeing, I always say 'having the appearance of or 'seemed
like/" don Juan warned me. "Everything one sees is so unique that there is no way to talk
about it except by comparing it to something known to us."
He said that the most adequate example of this difficulty was the way sorcerers talk about the
assemblage point and the glow that surrounds it. They describe them as brightness, yet it can-
not be brightness, because seers see them without their eyes. They have to fill out the
difference, however, and say that the assemblage point is a spot of light and that around it
there is a halo, a glow. Don Juan pointed out that we are so visual, so ruled by our predator's
perception, that everything we see must be rendered in terms of what the predator's eye
normally sees.
After seeing what the assemblage point and its surrounding glow seemed to be doing, don
Juan said that the old sorcerers advanced an explanation. They proposed that in human beings
the assemblage point, by focusing its glowing sphere on the universe's filaments of energy
that pass directly through it, automatically and without premeditation assembles those
filaments into a steady perception of the world.
"How are those filaments you talk about assembled into a steady perception of the world?" I
asked.
"No one can possibly know that," he emphatically replied. "Sorcerers see the movement of
energy, but just seeing the movement of energy cannot tell them how or why energy moves."
Don Juan stated that, seeing that millions of conscious energy filaments pass through the
assemblage point, the old sorcerers postulated that in passing through it they come together,
amassed by the glow that surrounds it. After seeing that the glow is extremely dim in people
who have been rendered unconscious or are about to die, and that it is totally absent from
corpses, they were convinced that this glow is awareness. "How about the assemblage point?
Is it absent from a corpse?" I asked.
He answered that there is no trace of an assemblage point on a dead being, because the
assemblage point and its surrounding glow are the mark of life and consciousness. The
inescapable conclusion of the sorcerers of antiquity was that awareness and perception go
together and are tied to the assemblage point and the glow that surrounds it.
"Is there a chance that those sorcerers might have been mistaken about their seeing?" I asked.
"I can't explain to you why, but there is no way sorcerers can be mistaken about their
seeing," don Juan said, in a tone that admitted no argument. "Now, the conclusions they
arrive at from their seeing might be wrong, but that would be because they are naive,
uncultivated. In order to avoid this disaster, sorcerers have to cultivate their minds, in
whatever form they can."
He softened up then and remarked that it certainly would be infinitely safer for sorcerers to
remain solely at the level of describing what they see, but that the temptation to conclude and
explain, even if only to oneself, is far too great to resist.
The effect of the assemblage point's displacement was another energy configuration the
sorcerers of antiquity were able to see and study. Don Juan said that when the assemblage
point is displaced to another position, a new conglomerate of millions of luminous energy
filaments come together on that point. The sorcerers of antiquity saw this and concluded that
since the glow of awareness is always present wherever the assemblage point is, perception is
automatically assembled there. Because of the different position of the assemblage point, the
resulting world, however, cannot be our world of daily affairs.
Don Juan explained that the old sorcerers were capable of distinguishing two types of
assemblage point displacement. One was a displacement to any position on the surface or in
the interior of the luminous ball; this displacement they called a shift of the assemblage point.
The other was a displacement to a position outside the luminous ball; they called this
displacement a movement of the assemblage point. They found out that the difference
between a shift and a movement was the nature of the perception each allows.
Since the shifts of the assemblage point are displacements within the luminous ball, the
worlds engendered by them, no matter how bizarre or wondrous or unbelievable they might
be, are still worlds within the human domain. The human domain is the energy filaments that
pass through the entire luminous ball. By contrast, movements of the assemblage point, since
they are displacements to positions outside the luminous ball, engage filaments of energy that
are beyond the human realm. Perceiving such filaments engenders worlds that are beyond
comprehension, inconceivable worlds with no trace of human antecedents in them.
The problem of validation always played a key role in my mind in those days. "Forgive me,
don Juan," I said to him on one occasion, "but this business of the assemblage point is an idea
so farfetched, so inadmissible that I don't know how to deal with it or what to think of it."
"There is only one thing for you to do," he retorted. "See the assemblage point! It isn't that
difficult to see. The difficulty is in breaking the retaining wall we all have in our minds that
holds us in place. To break it, all we need is energy. Once we have energy, seeing happens to
us by itself. The trick is in abandoning our fort of self-complacency and false security."
"It is obvious to me, don Juan, that it takes a lot of knowledge to see. It isn't just a matter of
having energy."
"It is just a matter of having energy, believe me. The hard part is convincing yourself that it
can be done. For this, you need to trust the nagual. The marvel of sorcery is that every
sorcerer has to prove everything with his own experience. I am telling you about the
principles of sorcery not with the hope that you will memorize them but with the hope that
you will practice them."
Don Juan was certainly right about the need for trusting. In the beginning stages of my
thirteen-year apprenticeship with him, the hardest thing for me was to affiliate myself with
his world and his person. This affiliating meant that I had to learn to trust him implicitly and
accept him without bias as the nagual.
Don Juan's total role in the sorcerers' world was synthesized in the title accorded to him by
his peers; he was called the nagual. It was explained to me that this concept refers to any
person, male or female, who possesses a specific kind of energy configuration, which to a
seer appears as a double luminous ball. Seers believe that when one of these people enters
into the sorcerers' world, that extra load of energy is turned into a measure of strength and the
capacity for leadership. Thus, the nagual is the natural guide, the leader of a party of
sorcerers.
At first, to feel such a trust for don Juan was quite disturbing to me, if not altogether odious.
When I discussed it with him, he assured me that to trust his teacher in such a manner had
been just as difficult for him.
"I told my teacher the same thing you are saying to me now," don Juan said. "He replied that
without trusting the nagual there is no possibility of relief and thus no possibility of clearing
the debris from our lives in order to be free."
Don Juan reiterated how right his teacher had been. And I reiterated my profound
disagreement. I told him that being reared in a stifling religious environment had had
dreadful effects on me, and that his teacher's statements and his own acquiescence to his
teacher reminded me of the obedience dogma that I had to learn as a child and that I
abhorred. "It sounds like you're voicing a religious belief when you talk about the nagual," I
said.
"You may believe whatever you want," don Juan replied undauntedly. "The fact remains,
there is no game without the nagual. I know this and I say so. And so did all the naguals who
preceded me. But they didn't say it from the standpoint of self-importance, and neither do I.
To say there is no path without the nagual is to refer totally to the fact that the man, the
nagual, is a nagual because he can reflect the abstract, the spirit, better than others. But that's
all. Our link is with the spirit itself and only incidentally with the man who brings us its
message."
I did learn to trust don Juan implicitly as the nagual, and this, as he had stated it, brought me
an immense sense of relief and a greater capacity to accept what he was striving to teach me.
In his teachings, he put a great emphasis on explaining and discussing the assemblage point. I
asked him once if the assemblage point had anything to. do with the physical body.
"It has nothing to do with what we normally perceive as the body," he said. "It's part of the
luminous egg, which is our energy self."
"How is it displaced?" I asked.
"Through energy currents. Jolts of energy, originating outside or inside our energy shape.
These are usually unpredictable currents that happen randomly, but with sorcerers they are
very predictable currents that obey the sorcerer's intent."
"Can you yourself feel these currents?"
"Every sorcerer feels them. Every human being does, for that matter, but average human
beings are too busy with their own pursuits to pay any attention to feelings like that."
"What do those currents feel like?"
"Like a mild discomfort, a vague sensation of sadness followed immediately by euphoria. Since
neither the sadness nor the euphoria has an explainable cause, we never regard them as veritable
onslaughts of the unknown but as unexplainable, ill-founded moodiness."
"What happens when the assemblage point moves outside the energy shape? Does it hang
outside? Or is it attached to the luminous ball?"
"It pushes the contours of the energy shape out, without breaking its energy boundaries."
Don Juan explained that the end result of a movement of the assemblage point is a total
change in the energy shape of a human being. Instead of a ball or an egg, he becomes some-
thing resembling a smoking pipe. The tip of the stem is the assemblage point, and the bowl of
the pipe is what remains of the luminous ball. If the assemblage point keeps on moving, a
moment comes when the luminous ball becomes a thin line of energy.
Don Juan went on to explain that the old sorcerers were the only ones who accomplished this
feat of energy shape transformation. And I asked him whether in their new energetic shape
those sorcerers were still men.
"Of course they were still men," he said. "But I think what you want to know is if they were
still men of reason, trustworthy persons. Well, not quite."
"In what way were they different?"
"In their concerns. Human endeavors and preoccupations had no meaning whatsoever to
them. They also had a definite new appearance."
"Do you mean that they didn't look like men?"
"It's very hard to tell what was what about those sorcerers. They certainly looked like men.
What else would they look like? But they were not quite like what you or I would expect. Yet
if you pressed me to tell in what way they were different, I would go in circles, like a dog
chasing its tail."
"Have you ever met one of those men, don Juan?"
"Yes, I have met one."
"What did he look like?"
"As far as looks, he looked like a regular person. Now, it was his behavior that was unusual."
"In what way was it unusual?"
"All I can tell you is that the behavior of the sorcerer I met is something that defies the
imagination. But to make it a matter of merely behavior is misleading. It is really something
you must see to appreciate."
"Were all those sorcerers like the one you met?"
"Certainly not. I don't know how the others were, except through sorcerers' stories handed
down from generation to generation. And those stories portray them as being quite bizarre."
"Do you mean monstrous?"
"Not at all. They say that they were very likable but extremely scary. They were more like
unknown creatures. What makes mankind homogeneous is the fact that we are all luminous
balls. And those sorcerers were no longer balls of energy but lines of energy that were trying
to bend themselves into circles, which they couldn't quite make."
"What finally happened to them, don Juan? Did they die?"
"Sorcerers' stories say that because they had succeeded in stretching their shapes, they had
also succeeded in stretching the duration of their consciousness. So they are alive and con-
scious to this day. There are stories about their periodic appearances on the earth."
"What do you think of all this yourself, don Juan?"
"It is too bizarre for me. I want freedom. Freedom to retain my awareness and yet disappear
into the vastness. In my personal opinion, those old sorcerers were extravagant, obsessive,
capricious men who got pinned down by their own machinations.
"But don't let my personal feelings sway you. The old sorcerers' accomplishment is
unparalleled. If nothing else, they proved to us that man's potentials are nothing to sneeze at."
Another topic of don Juan's explanations was the indispensability of energetic uniformity
and cohesion for the purpose of perceiving. His contention was that mankind perceives the
world we know, in the terms we do, only because we share energetic uniformity and
cohesion. He said that we automatically attain these two conditions of energy in the course of
our rearing and that they are so taken for granted we do not realize their vital importance
until we are faced with the possibility of perceiving worlds other than the world we know. At
those moments, it becomes evident that we need a new appropriate energetic uniformity and
cohesion to perceive coherently and totally.
I asked him what uniformity and cohesion were, and he explained that man's energetic shape
has uniformity in the sense that every human being on earth has the form of a ball or an egg.
And the fact that man's energy holds itself together as a ball or an egg proves it has cohesion.
He said that an example of a new uniformity and cohesion was the old sorcerers' energetic
shape when it became a line: every one of them uniformly became a line and cohesively
remained a line. Uniformity and cohesion at a line level permitted those old sorcerers to per-
ceive a homogeneous new world.
"How are uniformity and cohesion acquired?" I asked.
"The key is the position of the assemblage point, or rather the fixation of the assemblage
point," he said.
He did not want to elaborate any further at that time, so I asked him if those old sorcerers
could have reverted to being egglike. He replied that at one point they could have, but that
they did not. And then the line cohesion set in and made it impossible for them to go back.
He believed that what really crystallized that line cohesion and prevented them from making
the journey back was a matter of choice and greed. The scope of what those sorcerers were
able to perceive and do as lines of energy was astronomically greater than what an average
man or any average sorcerer can do or perceive.
He explained that the human domain when one is an energy ball is whatever energy filaments
pass through the space within the ball's boundaries. Normally, we perceive not all the
human domain but perhaps only one thousandth of it. He was of the opinion that, if we take
this into consideration, the enormity of what the old sorcerers did becomes apparent; they
extended themselves into a line a thousand times the size of a man as an energy ball and
perceived all the energy filaments that passed through that line.
On his insistence, I made giant efforts to understand the new model of energy configuration
he was outlining for me. Finally, after much pounding, I could follow the idea of energy fila-
ments inside the luminous ball and outside it. But if I thought of a multitude of luminous
balls, the model broke down in my mind. In a multitude of luminous balls, I reasoned, the
energy filaments that are outside one of them will perforce be inside the adjacent one. So in a
multitude there could not possibly be any energy filaments outside any luminous ball.
"To understand all this certainly isn't an exercise for your reason," he replied after carefully
listening to my arguments. "I have no way of explaining what sorcerers mean by filaments
inside and outside the human shape. When seers see the human energy shape, they see one
single ball of energy. If there is another ball next to it, the other ball is seen again as a single
ball of energy. The idea of a multitude of luminous balls comes from your knowledge of
human crowds. In the universe of energy, there are only single individuals, alone, surrounded
by the boundless.
"You must see that for yourself!"
I argued with don Juan then that it was pointless to tell me to see it for myself when he knew
I could not. And he proposed that I borrow his energy and use it to see. "How can I do that?
Borrow your energy."
"Very simple. I can make your assemblage point shift to another position more suitable to
perceiving energy directly."
This was the first time, in my memory, that he deliberately talked about something he had
been doing all along: making me enter into some incomprehensible state of awareness
that defied my idea of the world and of myself, a state he called the second attention. So, to
make my assemblage point shift to a position more suitable to perceiving energy directly, don
Juan slapped my back, between my shoulder blades, with such a force that he made me lose
my breath. I thought that I must have fainted or that the blow had made me fall asleep. Sud-
denly, I was looking or I was dreaming I was looking at something literally beyond words.
Bright strings of light shot out from everywhere, going everywhere, strings of light which
were like nothing that had ever entered my thoughts.
When I recovered my breath, or when I woke up, don Juan expectantly asked me, "What did
you see?" And when I answered, truthfully, "Your blow made me see stars," he doubled up
laughing.
He remarked that I was not ready yet to comprehend any unusual perception I might have
had. "I made your assemblage point shift," he went on, "and for an instant you were dreaming
the filaments of the universe. But you don't yet have the discipline or the energy to rearrange
your uniformity and cohesion. The old sorcerers were the consummate masters of that
rearranging. That was how they saw everything that can be seen by man." "What does it
mean to rearrange uniformity and cohesion?" "It means to enter into the second attention by
retaining the assemblage point on its new position and keeping it from sliding back to its
original spot."
Don Juan then gave me a traditional definition of the second attention. He said that the old
sorcerers called the result of fixing the assemblage point on new positions the second
attention and that they treated the second attention as an area of all-inclusive activity, just as
the attention of the daily world is. He pointed out that sorcerers really have two complete
areas for their endeavors: a small one, called the first attention or the awareness of our daily
world or the fixation of the assemblage point on its habitual position; and a much larger area,
the second attention or the awareness of other worlds or the fixation
of the assemblage point on each of an enormous number of new positions.
Don Juan helped me to experience inexplicable things in the second attention by means of
what he called a sorcerer's maneuver: tapping my back gently or forcefully striking it at the
height of my shoulder blades. He explained that with his blows he displaced my assemblage
point. From my experiential position, such displacements meant that my awareness used to
enter into a most disturbing state of unequaled clarity, a state of superconsciousness, which I
enjoyed for short periods of time and in which I could understand anything with minimal pre-
ambles. It was not quite a pleasing state. Most of the time it was like a strange dream, so
intense that normal awareness paled by comparison.
Don Juan justified the indispensability of such a maneuver, saying that in normal awareness a
sorcerer teaches his apprentices basic concepts and procedures and in the second attention he
gives them abstract and detailed explanations.
Ordinarily, apprentices do not remember these explanations at all, yet they somehow store
them, faithfully intact, in their memories. Sorcerers have used this seeming peculiarity of
memory and have turned remembering everything that happens to them in the second
attention into one of the most difficult and complex traditional tasks of sorcery.
Sorcerers explain this seeming peculiarity of memory, and the task of remembering, saying
that every time anyone enters into the second attention, the assemblage point is on a different
position. To remember, then, means to relocate the assemblage point on the exact position it
occupied at the time those entrances into the second attention occurred. Don Juan assured me
not only that sorcerers have total and absolute recall but that they relive every experience
they had in the second attention by this act of returning their assemblage point to each of
those specific positions. He also assured me that sorcerers dedicate a lifetime to fulfilling this
task of remembering. In the second attention, don Juan gave me very detailed explanations of
sorcery, knowing that the accuracy and fidelity of such instruction will remain with me,
faithfully intact, for
the duration of my life.
About this quality of faithfulness he said, "Learning something in the second attention is just
like learning when we were children. What we learn remains with us for life. 'It's second
nature with me,' we say when it comes to something we've learned very early in life."
Judging from where I stand today, I realize that don Juan made me enter, as many times as he
could, into the second attention in order to force me to sustain, for long periods of time, new
positions of my assemblage point and to perceive coherently in them, that is to say, he aimed
at forcing me to rearrange my uniformity and cohesion.
I succeeded countless times in perceiving everything as precisely as I perceive in the daily
world. My problem was my incapacity to make a bridge between my actions in the second
attention and my awareness of the daily world. It took a great deal of effort and time for me
to understand what the second attention is. Not so much because of its intricacy and complex-
ity, which are indeed extreme, but because, once I was back in my normal awareness, I found
it impossible to remember not only that I had entered into the second attention but that such a
state existed at all.
Another monumental breakthrough that the old sorcerers claimed, and that don Juan carefully
explained to me, was to find out that the assemblage point becomes very easily displaced
during sleep. This realization triggered another one: that dreams are totally associated with
that displacement. The old sorcerers saw that the greater the displacement, the more unusual
the dream or vice versa: the more unusual the dream, the greater the displacement. Don Juan
said that this observation led them to devise extravagant techniques to force the displacement
of the assemblage point, such as ingesting plants
that can produce altered states of consciousness; subjecting themselves to states of hunger,
fatigue, and stress; and especially controlling dreams. In this fashion, and perhaps without
even knowing it, they created dreaming.
One day, as we strolled around the plaza in the city of Oaxaca, don Juan gave me the most
coherent definition of dreaming from a sorcerer's standpoint.
"Sorcerers view dreaming as an extremely sophisticated art," he said, "the art of displacing
the assemblage point at will from its habitual position in order to enhance and enlarge the
scope of what can be perceived."
He said that the old sorcerers anchored the art of dreaming on five conditions they saw in the
energy flow of human beings.
One, they saw that only the energy filaments that pass directly through the assemblage point
can be assembled into coherent perception.
Two, they saw that if the assemblage point is displaced to another position, no matter how
minute the displacement, different and unaccustomed energy filaments begin to pass through
it, engaging awareness and forcing the assembling of these unaccustomed energy fields into a
steady, coherent perception.
Three, they saw that, in the course of ordinary dreams, the assemblage point becomes easily
displaced by itself to another position on the surface or in the interior of the luminous egg.
Four, they saw that the assemblage point can be made to move to positions outside the
luminous egg, into the energy filaments of the universe at large.
And, five, they saw that through discipline it is possible to cultivate and perform, in the
course of sleep and ordinary dreams, a systematic displacement of the assemblage point.

THE FIRST GATE OF DREAMING

s
_ a preamble to his first lesson in dreaming, don Juan talked about the second attention as a
progression: beginning as an idea that comes to us more like a curiosity than an actual
possibility; turning into something that can only be felt, as a sensation is felt; and finally
evolving into a state of being, or a realm of practicalities, or a preeminent force that opens for
us worlds beyond our wildest fantasies.
When explaining sorcery, sorcerers have two options. One is to speak in metaphorical terms
and talk about a world of magical dimensions. The other is to explain their business in
abstract terms proper to sorcery. I have always preferred the latter, although neither option
will ever satisfy the rational mind of a Western man.
Don Juan told me that what he meant by his metaphorical description of the second attention
as a progression was that, being a by-product of a displacement of the assemblage point, the
second attention does not happen naturally but must be intended, beginning with intending it
as an idea and ending up with intending it as a steady and controlled awareness of the
assemblage point's displacement.
"I am going to teach you the first step to power," don Juan said, beginning his instruction in
the art of dreaming. "I'm going to teach you how to set up dreaming."
"What does it mean to set up dreaming?"
"To set up dreaming means to have a precise and practical command over the general
situation of a dream. For example, you may dream that you are in your classroom. To set up
dreaming means that you don't let the dream slip into something else. You don't jump from
the classroom to the mountains, for instance. In other words, you control the view of the
classroom and don't let it go until you want to."
"But is it possible to do that?"
"Of course it's possible. This control is no different from the control we have over any
situation in our daily lives. Sorcerers are used to it and get it every time they want or need to.
In order to get used to it yourself, you must start by doing something very simple. Tonight, in
your dreams, you must look at your hands."
Not much more was said about this in the awareness of our daily world. In my recollection of
my experiences in the second attention, however, I found out that we had a more extensive
exchange. For instance, I expressed my feelings about the absurdity of the task, and don Juan
suggested that I should face it in terms of a quest that was entertaining, instead of solemn and
morbid.
'Get as heavy as you want when we talk about dreaming," he said. "Explanations always
call for deep thought. But when you actually dream, be as light as a feather. Dreaming has to
be performed with integrity and seriousness, but in the midst of laughter and with the
confidence of someone who doesn't have a worry in the world. Only under these conditions
can our dreams actually be turned into dreaming."
Don Juan assured me that he had selected my hands arbitrarily as something to look for in my
dreams and that looking for anything else was just as valid. The goal of the exercise was not
finding a specific thing but engaging my dreaming attention.
Don Juan described the dreaming attention as the control one acquires over one's dreams
upon fixating the assemblage point on any new position to which it has been displaced during
dreams. In more general terms, he called the dreaming attention an incomprehensible facet of
awareness that exists by itself, waiting for a moment when we would entice it, a moment
when we would give it purpose; it is a veiled faculty that every one of us has in reserve but
never has the opportunity to use in everyday life.
My first attempts at looking for my hands in my dreams were a fiasco. After months of
unsuccessful efforts, I gave up and complained to don Juan again about the absurdity of such
a task. "There are seven gates," he said as a way of answering, "and dreamers have to open
all seven of them, one at the time. You're up against the first gate that must be opened if you
are to dream."
"Why didn't you tell me this before?"
"It would've been useless to tell you about the gates of dreaming before you smacked your
head against the first one. Now you know that it is an obstacle and that you have to overcome
it."
Don Juan explained that there are entrances and exits in the energy flow of the universe and
that, in the specific case of dreaming, there are seven entrances, experienced as obstacles,
which sorcerers call the seven gates of dreaming.
"The first gate is a threshold we must cross by becoming aware of a particular sensation
before deep sleep," he said. "A sensation which is like a pleasant heaviness that doesn't let us
open our eyes. We reach that gate the instant we become aware that we're falling asleep,
suspended in darkness and heaviness."
"How do I become aware that I am falling asleep? Are there any steps to follow?"
"No. There are no steps to follow. One just intends to become aware of falling asleep."
"But how does one intend to become aware of it?"
"Intent or intending is something very difficult to talk about. I or anyone else would sound
idiotic trying to explain it. Bear that in mind when you hear what I have to say next: sorcerers
intend anything they set themselves to intend, simply by intending it."
"That doesn't mean anything, don Juan."
"Pay close attention. Someday it'll be your turn to explain. The statement seems nonsensical
because you are not putting it in the proper context. Like any rational man, you think that
understanding is exclusively the realm of our reason, of our mind.
"For sorcerers, because the statement I made pertains to intent and intending, understanding it
pertains to the realm of energy. Sorcerers believe that if one would intend that statement for
the energy body, the energy body would understand it in terms entirely different from those
of the mind. The trick is to reach the energy body. For that you need energy."
"In what terms would the energy body understand that statement, don Juan?"
"In terms of a bodily feeling, which it's hard to describe. You'll have to experience it to know
what I mean."
I wanted a more precise explanation, but don Juan slapped rny back and made me enter
into the second attention. At that time, what he did was still utterly mysterious to me. I
could have sworn that his touch hypnotized me. I believed he had instantaneously put me to
sleep, and I dreamt that I found myself walking with him on a wide avenue lined with trees in
some unknown city. It was such a vivid dream, and I was so aware of everything, that I
immediately tried to orient myself by reading signs and looking at people. It definitely was
not an English- or Spanish-speaking city, but it was a Western city. The people seemed to be
northern Europeans, perhaps Lithuanians. I became absorbed in trying to read billboards and
street signs.
Don Juan nudged me gently. "Don't bother with that," he said. "We are nowhere identifiable.
I've just lent you my energy so you would reach your energy body, and with it you've just
crossed into another world. This won't last long, so use your time wisely.
"Look at everything, but without being obvious. Don't let anyone notice you."
We walked in silence. It was a block-long walk, which had a remarkable effect on me. The
more we walked, the greater my sensation of visceral anxiety. My mind was curious, but my
body was alarmed. I had the clearest understanding that I was not in this world. When we got
to an intersection and stopped walking, I saw that the trees on the street had been carefully
trimmed. They were short trees with hard-looking, curled leaves. Each tree had a big square
space for watering. There were no weeds or trash in those spaces, as one would find around
trees in the city, only charcoal black, loose dirt.
The moment I focused my eyes on the curb, before I stepped off it to cross the street, I
noticed that there were no cars. I tried desperately to watch the people who milled around us,
to discover something about them that would explain my anxiety. As I stared at them, they
stared back at me. In one instant a circle of hard blue and brown eyes had formed around us.
A certainty hit me like a blow: this was not a dream at all; we were in a reality beyond what I
know to be real. I turned to face don Juan. I was about to realize what was different about
those
people, but a strange dry wind that went directly to my sinuses hit my face, blurred my view,
and made me forget what I wanted to tell don Juan. The next instant, I was back where I had
started from: don Juan's house. I was lying on a straw mat, curled up on my side.
"I lent you my energy, and you reached your energy body," don Juan said matter-of-factly.
I heard him talk, but I was numb. An unusual itching on my solar plexus kept my breaths
short and painful. I knew that I had been on the verge of finding something transcendental
about dreaming and about the people I had seen, yet I could not bring whatever I knew into
focus.
"Where were we, don Juan?" I asked. "Was it all a dream? A hypnotic state?"
"It wasn't a dream," he replied. "It was dreaming. I helped you reach the second attention so
that you would understand intending as a subject not for your reason but for your energy
body.
"At this point, you can't yet comprehend the import of all this, not only because you don't
have sufficient energy but because you're not intending anything. If you were, your energy
body would comprehend immediately that the only way to intend is by focusing your intent
on whatever you want to intend. This time I focused it for you on reaching your energy
body."
"Is the goal of dreaming to intend the energy body?" I asked, suddenly empowered by some
strange reasoning.
"One can certainly put it that way," he said. "In this particular instance, since we're talking
about the first gate of dreaming, the goal of dreaming is to intend that your energy body
becomes aware that you are falling asleep. Don't try to force yourself to be aware of falling
asleep. Let your energy body do it. To intend is to wish without wishing, to do without doing.
"Accept the challenge of intending," he went on. "Put your silent determination, without a
single thought, into convincing yourself that you have reached your energy body and that
you are a dreamer. Doing this will automatically put you in the position to be aware that you
are falling asleep."
"How can I convince myself that I am a dreamer when I am not?"
"When you hear that you have to convince yourself, you automatically become more rational.
How can you convince yourself you are a dreamer when you know you are not? Intending is
both: the act of convincing yourself you are indeed a dreamer, although you have never
dreamt before, and the act of being convinced."
"Do you mean I have to tell myself I am a dreamer and try my best to believe it? Is that it?"
"No, it isn't. Intending is much simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more complex than
that. It requires imagination, discipline, and purpose. In this case, to intend means that you
get an unquestionable bodily knowledge that you are a dreamer. You feel you are a dreamer
with all the cells of your body."
Don Juan added in a joking tone that he did not have sufficient energy to make me another
loan for intending and that the thing to do was to reach my energy body on my own. He
assured me that intending the first gate of dreaming was one of the means discovered by the
sorcerers of antiquity for reaching the second attention and the energy body.
After telling me this, he practically threw me out of his house, commanding me not to come
back until I had intended the first gate of dreaming.
I returned home, and every night for months I went to sleep intending with all my might to
become aware that I was falling asleep and to see my hands in my dreams. The other part of
the task-to convince myself that I was a dreamer and that I had reached my energy body-was
totally impossible for me.
Then, one afternoon while taking a nap, I dreamt I was looking at my hands. The shock was
enough to wake me up. It proved to be a unique dream that could not be repeated. Weeks
went by, and I was unable either to become aware that I was falling asleep or to find my
hands. I began to notice, however, that I was having in my dreams a vague feeling that there
was something I should have been doing but could not remember. This feeling became so
strong that it kept on waking me up at all hours of the night.
When I told don Juan about my futile attempts to cross the first gate of dreaming, he gave me
some guidelines. "To ask a dreamer to find a determined item in his dreams is a subterfuge,"
he said. "The real issue is to become aware that one is falling asleep. And, strange as it may
seem, that doesn't happen by commanding oneself to be aware that one is falling asleep but
by sustaining the sight of whatever one is looking at in a dream."
He told me that dreamers take quick, deliberate glances at everything present in a dream. If
they focus their dreaming attention on something specific, it is only as a point of departure.
From there, dreamers move on to look at other items in the dream's content, returning to the
point of departure as many times as possible.
After a great effort, I indeed found hands in my dreams, but they never were mine. They were
hands that only seemed to belong to me, hands that changed shape, becoming quite night-
marish at times. The rest of my dreams' content, nonetheless, was always pleasantly steady. I
could almost sustain the view of anything I focused my attention on.
It went on like this for months, until one day when my capacity to dream changed seemingly
by itself. I had done nothing special besides my constant earnest determination to be aware
that I was falling asleep and to find my hands.
I dreamt I was visiting my hometown. Not that the town I was dreaming about looked at all
like my hometown, but somehow I had the conviction that it was the place where I was born.
It all began as an ordinary, yet very vivid dream. Then the light in the dream changed. Images
became sharper. The street where I was walking became noticeably more real than a moment
before. My feet began to hurt. I could feel that things were absurdly hard. For instance, on
bumping into a door, not only did I experience pain on the knee that hit the door but I also
was enraged by my clumsiness.
I realistically walked in that town until I was completely exhausted. I saw everything I could
have seen had I been a tourist walking through the streets of a city. And there was no
difference whatsoever between that dream walk and any walk I had actually taken on the
streets of a city I visited for the first time.
"I think you went a bit too far," don Juan said after listening to my account. "All that was
required was your awareness of falling asleep. What you've done is equivalent to bringing a
wall down just to squash a mosquito sitting on it."
"Do you mean, don Juan, that I flubbed it?"
"No. But apparently you're trying to repeat something you did before. When I made your
assemblage point shift and you and I ended up in that mysterious city, you were not asleep.
You were dreaming, but not asleep, meaning that your assemblage point didn't reach that
position through a normal dream. I forced it to shift.
"You certainly can reach the same position through dreaming, but I wouldn't advise you to do
that at this time."
"Is it dangerous?"
"And how! Dreaming has to be a very sober affair. No false movement can be afforded.
Dreaming is a process of awakening, of gaining control. Our dreaming attention must be sys-
tematically exercised, for it is the door to the second attention."
"What's the difference between the dreaming attention and the second attention?"
"The second attention is like an ocean, and the dreaming attention is like a river feeding into
it. The second attention is the condition of being aware of total worlds, total like our
world is total, while the dreaming attention is the condition of being aware of the items of our
dreams."
He heavily stressed that the dreaming attention is the key to every movement in the sorcerers'
world. He said that among the multitude of items in our dreams, there exist real energetic
interferences, things that have been put in our dreams extraneously, by an alien force. To be
able to find them and follow them is sorcery.
The emphasis he put on those statements was so pronounced that I had to ask him to explain
them. He hesitated for a moment before answering.
"Dreams are, if not a door, a hatch into other worlds," he began. "As such, dreams are a two-
way street. Our awareness goes through that hatch into other realms, and those other realms
send scouts into our dreams."
"What are those scouts?"
"Energy charges that get mixed with the items of our normal dreams. They are bursts of
foreign energy that come into our dreams, and we interpret them as items familiar or
unfamiliar to us."
"I am sorry, don Juan, but I can't make heads or tails out of your explanation."
"You can't because you're insisting on thinking about dreams in terms known to you: what
occurs to us during sleep. And I am insisting on giving you another version: a hatch into
other realms of perception. Through that hatch, currents of unfamiliar energy seep in. Then
the mind or the brain or whatever takes those currents of energy and turns them into parts of
our dreams."
He paused, obviously to give my mind time to take in what he was telling me. "Sorcerers are
aware of those currents of foreign energy," he continued. "They notice them and strive to
isolate them from the normal items of their dreams."
"Why do they isolate them, don Juan?"
"Because they come from other realms. If we follow them to their source, they serve us as
guides into areas of such mystery that sorcerers shiver at the mere mention of such a
possibility." "How do sorcerers isolate them from the normal items of their dreams?"
"By the exercise and control of their dreaming attention. At one moment, our dreaming
attention discovers them among the items of a dream and focuses on them, then the total
dream collapses, leaving only the foreign energy."
Don Juan refused to explain the topic any further. He went back to discussing my dreaming
experience and said that, all in all, he had to take my dream as being my first genuine attempt
at dreaming, and that this meant I had succeeded in reaching the first gate of dreaming.
During another discussion, at a different time, he abruptly brought up the subject again. He
said, "I'm going to repeat what you must do in your dreams in order to pass the first gate of
dreaming. First you must focus your gaze on anything of your choice as the starting point.
Then shift your gaze to other items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze on as
many things as you can. Remember that if you glance only briefly, the images don't shift.
Then go back to the item you first looked at."
"What does it mean to pass the first gate of dreaming?"
"We reach the first gate of dreaming by becoming aware that we are falling asleep, or by
having, like you did, a gigantically real dream. Once we reach the gate, we must cross it by
being able to sustain the sight of any item of our dreams."
"I can almost look steadily at the items of my dreams, but they dissipate too quickly."
"This is precisely what I am trying to tell you. In order to offset the evanescent quality of
dreams, sorcerers have devised the use of the starting point item. Every time you isolate it
and look at it, you get a surge of energy, so at the beginning don't look at too many things in
your dreams. Four items will suffice. Later on, you may enlarge the scope until you can cover
all you want, but as soon as the images begin to shift and you feel you are losing control, go
back to your starting point item and start all over again."
"Do you believe that I really reached the first gate of dreaming, don Juan?"
"You did, and that's a lot. You'll find out, as you go along, how easy it'll be to do dreaming
now."
I thought don Juan was either exaggerating or giving me incentive. But he assured me he was
being on the level.
"The most astounding thing that happens to dreamers," he said, "is that, on reaching the first
gate, they also reach the energy body."
"What exactly is the energy body?"
"It's the counterpart of the physical body. A ghostlike configuration made of pure energy."
"But isn't the physical body also made out of energy?"
"Of course it is. The difference is that the energy body has only appearance but no mass.
Since it's pure energy, it can perform acts that are beyond the possibilities of the physical
body."
"Such as what for example, don Juan?"
"Such as transporting itself in one instant to the ends of the universe. And dreaming is the art
of tempering the energy body, of making it supple and coherent by gradually exercising it.
"Through dreaming we condense the energy body until it's a unit capable of perceiving. Its
perception, although affected by our normal way of perceiving the daily world, is an
independent perception. It has its own sphere."
"What is that sphere, don Juan?"
"Energy. The energy body deals with energy in terms of energy. There are three ways in
which it deals with energy in dreaming: it can perceive energy as it flows, or it can use
energy to boost itself like a rocket into unexpected areas, or it can perceive as we ordinarily
perceive the world."
'What does it mean to perceive energy as it flows?"
"It means to see. It means that the energy body sees energy directly as a light or as a
vibrating current of sorts or as a disturbance. Or it feels it directly as a jolt or as a sensation
that can even be pain."
"What about the other way you talked about, don Juan? The energy body using energy as a
boost."
"Since energy is its sphere, it is no problem for the energy body to use currents of energy that
exist in the universe to propel itself. All it has to do is isolate them, and off it goes with
them."
He stopped talking and seemed to be undecided, as if he wanted to add something but was
not sure about it. He smiled at me, and, just as I was beginning to ask him a question, he
continued his explanation.
"I've mentioned to you before that sorcerers isolate in their dreams scouts from other realms,"
he said. "Their energy bodies do that. They recognize energy and go for it. But it isn't
desirable for dreamers to indulge in searching for scouts. I was reluctant to tell you about it,
because of the facility with which one can get swayed by that search."
Don Juan then quickly went on to another subject. He carefully outlined for me an entire
block of practices. At the time, I found that on one level it was all incomprehensible to me,
yet on another it was perfectly logical and understandable. He reiterated that reaching, with
deliberate control, the first gate of dreaming is a way of arriving at the energy body. But to
maintain that gain is predicated on energy alone. Sorcerers get that energy by redeploying, in
a more intelligent manner, the energy they have and use for perceiving the daily world.
When I urged don Juan to explain it more clearly, he added that we all have a determined
quantity of basic energy. That quantity is all the energy we have, and we use all of it for per-
ceiving and dealing with our engulfing world. He repeated various times, to emphasize it,
that there is no more energy for us anywhere and, since our available energy is already
engaged,
there is not a single bit left in us for any extraordinary perception, such as dreaming. "Where
does that leave us?" I asked.
"It leaves us to scrounge energy for ourselves, wherever we can find it," he replied.
Don Juan explained that sorcerers have a scrounging method. They intelligently redeploy
their energy by cutting down anything they consider superfluous in their lives. They call this
method the sorcerers' way. In essence, the sorcerers' way, as don Juan put it, is a chain of
behavioral choices for dealing with the world, choices much more intelligent than those our
progenitors taught us. These sorcerers' choices are designed to revamp our lives by altering
our basic reactions about being alive. "What are those basic reactions?" I asked. "There are
two ways of facing our being alive," he said. "One is to surrender to it, either by acquiescing
to its demands or by fighting those demands. The other is by molding our particular life
situation to fit our own configurations." "Can we really mold our life situation, don Juan?"
"One's particular life situation can be molded to fit one's, specifications," don Juan insisted.
"Dreamers do that. A wild statement? Not really, if you consider how little we know about
ourselves."
He said that his interest, as a teacher, was to get me thoroughly involved with the themes of
life and being alive; that is to say, with the difference between life, as a consequence of bio-
logical forces, and the act of being alive, as a matter of cognition.
"When sorcerers talk about molding one's life situation," don Juan explained, "they mean
molding the awareness of being alive. Through molding this awareness, we can get enough
energy to reach and sustain the energy body, and with it we can
certainly mold the total direction and consequences of our lives."
Don Juan ended our conversation about dreaming admonishing me not merely to think about
what he had told me but to turn his concepts into a viable way of life by a process of
repetition. He claimed that everything new in our lives, such as the sorcerers' concepts he was
teaching me, must be repeated to us to the point of exhaustion before we open ourselves to it.
He pointed out that repetition is the way our progenitors socialized us to function in the daily
world.
As I continued my dreaming practices, I gained the capability of being thoroughly aware that
I was falling asleep as well as the capability of stopping in a dream to examine at will any-
thing that was part of that dream's content. To experience this was for me no less than
miraculous.
Don Juan stated that as we tighten the control over our dreams, we tighten the mastery over
our dreaming attention. He was right in saying that the dreaming attention comes into play
when it is called, when it is given a purpose. Its coming into play is not really a process, as
one would normally understand a process: an ongoing system of operations or a series of
actions or functions that bring about an end result. It is rather an awakening. Something
dormant becomes suddenly functional.

THE SECOND GATE OF DREAMING

ound out by means of my dreaming practices that a dreaming teacher must create a didactic
synthesis in order to emphasize a given point. In essence, what don Juan wanted with my first
task was to exercise my dreaming attention by focusing it on the items of my dreams. To this
effect he used as a spearhead the idea of being aware of falling asleep. His subterfuge was to
say that the only way to be aware of falling asleep is to examine the elements of one's
dreams.
I realized, almost as soon as I had begun my dreaming practices, that exercising the dreaming
attention is the essential Point in dreaming. To the mind, however, it seems impossible